Our foraging ancestors lived or died depending on how much others valued them, because that affected the willingness of others to render help. In deciding how to act, they needed to balance the direct payoff of an action against its social consequences. Does the intensity of shame you anticipate feeling reflect how negatively others would see you if you did that act--allowing you to weigh the social consequences of an action (e.g., stealing) against its direct payoff (e.g., acquiring)? Does the intensity of anticipated pride reflect how much more they would value you if you took an action? That is, does the intensity of these feelings have an adaptive function for decision-making?

Pride--sin or incentive?

Recent research at the CEP shows that the intensity of pride people feel when considering a given act or trait is set by an implicit mental map of what others value. That was true across 16 countries in four continents for people in WEIRD societies (ones that are Western(ized), Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic; see Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride by Daniel Sznycer et al., PNAS 2017; Click here for the press release.).

New! But are these regularities the fingerprints of an evolved adaptation? Or do they exist because cultural evolution made WEIRD societies similar to one another? To find out, Sznycer and colleagues tested people in 10 non-WEIRD societies--small-scale traditional societies in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. For the answer, see Invariances in the architecture of pride across small-scale societies (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018) by Sznycer, D., Xygalatas, D., Alami, S., An, X-F, Ananyeva, K., Fukushima, S., Hitokoto, H., Kharitonov, A., Koster, J., Onyishi, C., Onyishi, I., Romero, P., Takemura, K., Zhuang, J-Y, Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. For more on The Value of Pride, click here.

Shame--a pathological emotion? Or did shame evolve as a defense against devaluation by others?

New! As with pride, we wanted to know whether these regularities in the intensity of shame are the fingerprints of an evolved adaptation--or do they exist because cultural evolution made WEIRD societies similar to one another? This time, Sznycer and colleagues tested people in 15 non-WEIRD societies--small-scale traditional societies in Africa, South America, Eurasia, and Asia. For the answer, see Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018). See also The Universality of Shame.

New! CEP graduate Michael Barlev won the 2018 New Investigator Award from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society for his work on "How the mind builds evolutionarily new concepts".

New! CEP faculty Dan Conroy-Beam and Zoe Liberman were named Rising Stars of 2018 by the Association for Psychological Science. This award recognizes outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.

Using a series of computer-based simulations, Max Krasnow, Andrew Delton, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby demonstrate that individual selection pressures will give rise to and maintain punishment behavior given biologically plausible assumptions based on the social ecology and psychology of ancestral humans. Their findings appear in the journal PLosONE. Click here to read the article.

Research conducted by Aaron Sell at Griffith University in Australia and John Tooby and Leda Cosmides at UCSB have identified the functional advantages that caused the specific appearance of the anger face to evolve. Their findings appear in the journal Evolution and
Human Behavior. Click here to read the press release and for more information.

Topics of Interest

For our previous research on how intergroup conflict decreases racial categorization and FAQ, see this:

Differences in political opinions: an occasion for calm reflection or a signal that people belong to rival gangs? A new study shows that political opinions engage an evolved system that tracks who is allied with whom, categorizing people by their coalitional alliances. When race does not predict political alliances, this alliance detection system categorizes people as members of rival political parties and starts to ignore race. What's more, racial categorization decreases, but categorization by sex and age do not. This is what you would expect if the mind treats race as an alliance cue...and nothing more. See Constituents of Political Cognition, by David Pietraszewski, Oliver Curry, Michael Bang Petersen, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides. Click here for the press release and here to read the article.

Is it possible to prevent people from automatically categorizing others by race? Years of psychological research suggest that race is always encoded in the process of impression formation, but the idea that the mind would have evolved mechanisms to identify racial categories is implausible given that our hunter-gatherer ancestors rarely to never encountered people of different races. See Can race be erased?: Coalitional computation and social categorization by Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(26), 15387-15392. Click here for FAQ and more

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For other recent CEP research on the psychology of coalitions and other kinds of group cooperation, see the following:

Humans cooperate in groups, but what is it about the human mind that makes this possible? To find out whether the mind has an evolved concept for identifying free riders-- individuals who take the benefits of group cooperation without contributing--see Delton, A. W., Cosmides, L., Guemo, M., Robertson, T. E., & Tooby, J. (2012). See The psychosemantics of free riding: Dissecting the architecture of a moral concept, by Delton, A. W., Cosmides, L., Guemo, M., Robertson, T. E., & Tooby, J. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012. Advance online publication. (Supplemental)

What explains our strong inclination to track the reputations of others and to punish their bad behavior? We report new empirical tests that suggest these features of human nature are adaptations for deriving benefits from small-scale interactions, not from inter-group competition. See What are punishment & reputation for? by Max Krasnow, Leda Cosmides, Eric Pedersen, and John Tooby in PLOS ONE, 2012. (UCSB Press Release; Supplemental)

What explains why humans are so generous, even in one-shot interactions? We show how the inherent uncertainty of social decision making, in combination with selection for direct reciprocity, leads to striking amounts of generosity. Our work reveals that natural selection creates motivation to be generous even in situations where generosity appears economically irrational. See The evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters by Andrew W. Delton, Max M. Krasnow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011. Click here for more

Click here to see a Science letter by Delton, Krasnow, Cosmides, and Tooby on alternative approaches to the evolution of cooperation.

Just how specialized is the cheater detection mechanism? New research shows that it is activated only when the search for rule violations has the potential to reveal someone’s character—their propensity to cheat. It does not search for violations of social exchange rules when these are accidental, when they do not benefit the violator, or when the situation would make cheating difficult. See Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence by Leda Cosmides, Clark Barrett, and John Tooby in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2010. click here for more

What creates individual differences in personality? Does adaptively-patterned personality variation arise via specific gene polymorphisms (as predicted by evolutionary genetic models) or universal mechanisms that use information about you to calibrate your personality to fit your circumstances (as predicted by adaptationist models)? See The origins of extraversion: Joint effects of facultative calibration and genetic polymorphism by Aaron W. Lukaszewski and James R. Roney in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, March 2011.

Do our minds have cognitive systems that evolved for foraging, hunting, and avoiding predators? See: